North San Juan

We spent Sunday evening (after a wrong turn that cost us an hour), Monday, and Tuesday morning in North San Juan, where my brother Charles, sister-and-law Laura, and nephew Randy live on the most expansive of the Svoboda properties. It was a family reunion: Susie, Stephane and Luca were visiting from France, and Stevie just made it over after returning from two weeks in Bali. Others stayed in tents in the front yard, but Jenny, Elena and I stayed at a very pleasant bed and breakfast, Milano's Inn, run by Frank and Jeanie Milano, built from the ground up by the two of them. North San Juan is a part of the world where people do things like that by themselves; fortunately for me, I didn't have to compare myself with them all day, and we returned to Oakland in time for the National Night Out Ice Cream Social at the local toddler's park, where Elena ran herself to exhaustion while we met our neighbors and discussed preschools with them.